presence. the touch of the puppet

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PRESENCE: THE TOUCH OF THE PUPPET

Paul Zelevansky

Using the ideal of the puppet as model and foil, this article looks at ideas about presence, play,animation, and belief. Puppetry’s role as a vital, theatrical form has deep roots in universal,cultural experience, and the notion of an inhering spirit that acts for and through image, idol,toy, or fetish is perhaps the central thread running through all attempts to represent andsimulate animate life. Through a discussion of the phenomenology of the puppet—the source of its sensory, aesthetic, and metaphysical power—questions are raised about the projection of desire and purpose onto other transitional things, real and imagined.

KEY WORDS: puppets; play; animation; presence; projection.

Address correspondence to Paul Zelevansky, Ed.D., 1455 Claridge Drive, Beverly Hills, CA90210, USA; e-mail: [email protected].

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 66, No. 3, September 2006 ( Ó 2006) DOI: 10.1007/s11231-006-9022-6

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0002-9548/06/0900-0263 Ó 2006 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis



LOOKING FOR A SIGN

I’ve got the world on a string, I’m sitting on a rainbow ,

Got the string around my finger .

What a world, what a life—I’m in love .

—Harold Arlen/T. Koehler (1953)

In Art, as in life, meaning flows from the ways in which communicationis extended: how and why it is presented, the values and coherenceprojected onto what is offered, and the fit between our needs and whatis being asked for and promised in return. In this respect, much hasbeen asked of the Puppet: ideal, metaphor, servant, and foil for humandreams of transcendence and control. The notion of an inhering spiritthat acts for and through image, idol, toy or fetish, is perhaps the cen-tral thread running through all attempts to represent and simulate ani-mate life, and puppetry’s role as a vital, theatrical form has deep rootsin universal, cultural experience. But here my concerns are more nar-rowly focused on the impulse that activates the dynamic among puppet,audience, and the puppeteer’s craft. I want to speculate on the phenom-enology of the puppet, the source of its sensory, aesthetic, and meta-physical charge, and, more broadly, to raises questions about theprojection of desire and purpose onto other transitional things, real andimagined.

The understanding that allows people to ‘‘sign on’’ to the puppet’slife also points to the investment in other Signs to which they attributepower and sometimes moral design: sacred space, good and bad luck,the weather, answered prayers, the alignment of the stars. Small chil-dren, household pets, and puppets are held to a different standard.

Credited with spontaneity and instinct, their authority is vested in theirability to extend sympathetic emotional appeals. The split between ourknowledge and theirs is filled by empathy and guileless affection repre-sented in children’s literature by loyal dogs, quizzical cats, curiousmonkeys, and other emblems of innocence and vulnerability. For thesake of the parents, animal, child, and puppet make the world safe forambiguity and magic.

To shore up a justifiably fragile sense of agency, adults must look toforces beyond or ‘‘bigger’’ than themselves—God, nature, spirit, con-

science, fate—that are also personally interested in their everyday lives,politics, business deals, and sporting events. Animals sniff the ground for

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the scent and the presence of friend, foe, or food. The puppet turns in our

direction because it needs our attention. In search of the primal and thedivine, consciousness lifts its leg, marks its turf, and waits for a reply.Knock on wood.

In The Child’s Conception of the World , Swiss epistemologist Jean Pia-get (1972) explores the strategies of reasoning and interpretation that leadchildren in the West from the general belief that all the things of theworld are conscious and animate to the kinds of distinctions that allow

for more pragmatic characterizations and applications. In the chaptersdealing with animism —the tendency for children ‘‘to regard objects asliving and endowed with will’’ (p. 170)—and artificialism —the impulse toregard things as ‘‘the product of human creation, rather than attributingcreative activity to the things themselves’’ (p. 253)—Piaget presents a ser-ies of interviews where children between 4 and 10 years of age are askedto define life and consciousness with regard to both the elements of nat-ure and common, inanimate objects. The interview form involves askingquestions that acknowledge the child’s thinking process by building sub-

sequent questions on the child’s immediate responses. ‘‘Is the sunalive?—Yes .—Why?—It gives light .—Is a candle alive?—No .—Why no-t?—(Yes) because it gives light. It is alive when it is giving light, but it isn’t alive when it is not giving light ... (p. 196).

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As children learn to distinguish the psychic from the physical, they de-

fine objects by their use , as opposed to their type or classification. Sinceevery object is ‘‘endowed with a particular activity and force’’ (p. 198)that compels it, motion and mobility are signs that things are fulfillingtheir designated and destined roles in the environment. Piaget asks ques-tions about clouds, leaves, water, bicycles, tables, fire, sun, and moon—-there is nothing about puppets. But the reasoning that first seesconsciousness as inherent in anything that moves, and then ultimately de-fines it as the property of only those things that can propel themselves, orbe propelled, would presumably leave puppets in need of active guid-

ance from their handlers. Like the fallen autumn leaves that a 6 1/2 yearold sees as dead until the wind blows them along, ‘‘Life is assimilated tomovement’’ (p. 199), suggesting that what can be made to move can becompelled to serve and take its meaningful place in the child’s cosmol-ogy. Implicit in the notion that things and forces have inherent power andwill is that they are guided by purpose: human or divine. What respondsand acts can live out its destiny as a meaningful thing. Children then be-lieve in both their right and their ability to affect the world, because theywitness the efficacy of causes and effects in nature’s design. Life is the

medium that models and animates this exchange.

PUPPETS ARE US

Faith gives the assurance that our lives and our history have a moral design. As individuals, we know that suffering is temporary, and hope is eternal. As a

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nation, we know the ruthless will not inherit the Earth. Faith teaches humility,

and with it, tolerance. Once we have recognized God’s image in ourselves, we must recognize it in every human being .

—George W. Bush (2002)

Politics is built on the arts of persuasion, negotiation, and manipulationas well as the exercise of raw power. In a democracy or a dictatorship,this requires some expression of public idealism to locate what is oftenblatant self-interest on a higher plane. The promise is imbued with no-

tions of service—of a calling—as leaders offer themselves up as channelsfor the Will of the People, God, the Nation, Prosperity, Destiny, theredressing of perceived wrongs, past and present. Visions of punishmentand reward take many forms because there are many audiences, agendas,and fears to be acknowledged. That is why coalitions—tribal or ideologi-cal—need enemies as well as friends. So the evocation of the straw man,stalking horse, fifth column, or puppet leader whose strings are pulledfrom behind the scenes is no less important than the elevation of the saintor martyr. Exceptionalism requires a rhetoric but also an image of a plod-

ding or diabolical enemy—bureaucrat, special interest, immigrant, terror-ist—that has a face, intentions, and will. Therefore a speech from apolitician that points beyond short-term self-interest to inclusive universalconcerns is a sign of either spiritual restitution or rank hypocrisy: the pup-peteer posing as a willing puppet ready to sacrifice for the commongood. Assertions of principle—’’heart-felt’’ or mendacious—do not appearor operate in a vacuum. There are always strings attached.

In the above ‘‘remarks’’ before an initiated group of administration col-leagues and supporters, George W. Bush takes the notion of faith as botha fact and a process based in a verifiable condition: what the heart andspirit ‘‘know’’ is made more powerful by its being both transcendent andyet accessible to common sense. Once ‘‘recognized,’’ faith is beyondquestion and in control. ‘‘Faith gives the assurance....’’ All notions of theworkings of faith grow from a ground of belief that itself requires a leap,or a loop, of faith: projecting an image of a responsive order onto theworld and then investing in keeping the connection alive. Whatever elsegoverns Bush’s intentions in flattering, manipulating, or communing witha like-minded audience, this assumption of an unassailable point of viewis what gives him permission to speak in this way. Despite his endorse-ment of humility and tolerance, he knows with certainty where dangerand redemption are coming from, and his characterization of reality flowsfrom it.




THE SOUL OF THE PUPPET

In The Theatrical Inanimate , a collection of reviews and essays gath-ered at a 1992 conference on puppetry sponsored by the Henson Foun-dation, several contemporary puppeteers draw on animistic metaphors toidentify the source of the puppet’s life. Peter Schumann, puppeteer andfounder of the renowned Bread and Puppet Theater, writes in his essay‘‘On the Radicality of the Puppet Theater’’:

The soul of things, don’t reveal themselves easily. What speaks out of a doll’seyes is often beyond control. The manipulation of puppets is over and abovethe willful targeting which aims for certain results from the audience. The pup-peteer’s only hope of mastering their puppets is to enter their puppets’ delicateand seemingly inexhaustible lives.

While concepts like ‘‘soul,’’ ‘‘beyond control,’’ and ‘‘inexhaustible lives’’assume beliefs about the ineffable that are not self-evident, certainly the

eyes of dolls and puppets look back in ways that provoke empathy anduncertainty. If puppets can be said to have ‘‘presence,’’ it is a product of their gaze as well as their expressions and gestures; the degree to whichthey seem to reach out to a sympathetic viewer.

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Many of the static images in this essay use the eyes to absorb or reflectexpectations. Pinocchio, Felix the Cat, the plastic owl, the smiley face,and others express latent life and consciousness in this way. Significantlyinfluencing the legal and ethical questions surrounding the right-to-diecase of Teri Schiavo was the effect of selective video images—most pre-dating the public controversy by 3 years—showing her with open, activeeyes. These images, shown repeatedly on TV news networks, were meantto undermine medical testimony that while she might be alive physiologi-

cally, she lacked brain activity that would indicate consciousness or anysense that she understood her situation. In the absence of other signs, shewas made to appear present through her eyes. Now that the results of anautopsy—following the removal of her feeding tube—revealed her tohave been blind as well as severely brain-damaged, the orchestrated pro-motion of the video as evidence becomes even more damaging.

The equation of sight with sentience is an ideological trope of longstanding: the eyes as the proverbial pathway to the soul, blindness equa-ted with ignorance. The figure with open eyes is seemingly aware of you,

in need of your attention and concern. Yet the linguistic roots of presence seem quite concrete and pragmatic considering how difficult it is toquantify something that emanates from someone who exhibits a kind of magnetic, concentrated focus in ‘‘person,’’ or on stage or screen.




pres.ence: 1. attendance or company. 6. the ability to project a senseof ease, poise, or self-assurance, esp. the quality or manner of a per-son’s manner before an audience.pres.en.ta.tion: 1. an act of presenting. 8 a manner or style of speaking,

instructing or putting oneself forward.pres.ent: adj. 1. being, existing, or occurring at this time or now; cur-rent.pres.ent: v.t to furnish or endow with a gift, esp. by formal act; n. agift.pre.sen.ti.ment. n. a feeling or impression that something is about tohappen, esp. something evil or foreboding.

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Taken together, the definitions suggest that what is being offered through

presence is a gift, and that this potential exchange is taking place in a pres-ent moment filled with possibility. Presence with regard to the anthropo-morphic puppet or an inanimate object then refers to stance, affect, a sparkof life or will, or a seeming awareness of place ; a holding of position, asthe figure, object or image draws attention by holding its ground.

We respond to the moment, but at the same time we respond on its behalf, weanswer for it. A newly-created concrete reality has been laid in our arms; weanswer for it. A dog has looked at you, you answer for its glance, a child has

clutched your hand, you answer for its touch, a host of men moves about you,you answer for their need. (Buber, 1965, p. 17).

The spirit of dialogue that Martin Buber poetically invokes in Between Man and Man rests on the idea of a fluid and dynamic call and response . Themeaning of answer, glance , touch , and need is not in any way transparent,as each appeals to and is wholly reliant on the interpretation of signs andsensory effects, but what Buber is proposing is the presence of a deeper le-vel of interaction that he believes already informs most encounters amongpeople, animals, and things. ‘‘Answering’’ is not an elusive, transcendentalpromise, but an imbedded, existential need woven into the opportunitiesand actions of everyday life. In this sense, the communal give and take of dialogue is less about the accountable ends of the exchange than the visual




means that facilitate it—or, as in the case of the embrace between puppet

and puppeteer, the touch that is both kinetic and metaphysical.

THE PUPPET SPEAKS

Whether on a formal stage or in a children’s play, the puppet stands infor a variety of human and anthropomorphic animal behaviors. Hero,victim, companion, trickster—apparently acting on its own or under theexplicit supervision of a puppeteer-the puppet is a willing pawn servingthe needs of stories and life lessons. Through the puppeteer’s voice and

gesture, the puppet communicates verbally and nonverbally and maymove between human and animal expression—dependence or indepen-dence—without disrupting its sense of coherence as character, becauseits life is provisional. Growth and change may be more clearly the prod-uct of ‘‘outside’’ (human, humane?) forces, but because the puppet ismade of familiar materials like wood, fabric, or paper, it can appear to beinhabited yet remain benign.

The clip art image on the facing page suggests otherwise. A representa-tion of a two-dimensional imaginative reality, it is not expected to be alive

or thinking, yet by looking away it appears to have intentions, if not suspi-cions, about the audience. This in turn requires that we entertain some sus-picion about it. In a drawing or a puppet, the eyes may call out forrecognition, or they may deceive, but they always signal consciousness.

Puppets are actors, and like human actors, when they are through per-forming, they are usually not required to bear responsibility for what theyhave done on stage. While the puppet as medium can represent and mimeour good and bad impulses, he or she or it is not supposed to be us. Assign-ing the puppet’s passivity or fragility to people—He or she or is just a pup-

pet!—suggests that the unwillingness to exercise power and autonomy isnot to be respected. Except when in the thrall of criminal or divine forces,people are supposed to take charge of their own destinies. To merit sympa-thy, puppets and people must become helpless or unwitting victims of fateand circumstance. Yet the popularity of TV shows like Court TV , confes-sional talk shows, and varieties of ‘‘reality’’ scenarios suggests another vari-ant of the puppet model in which submission to the power of others—TVproducers, pompous judges, and righteous audiences—can be rewarded.Unlike actors, who it is presumably understood are professionals playing

roles made up of assigned character, speech, and gesture, amateur per-formers on reality shows like Survivor or American Idol are an amalgam of striving human and unwitting pawn: the schemer, the optimist, the inno-cent, the lover, and so on. That is, while they are TV puppets competingwith other puppets for prizes in a game that they do not control, they are

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still expected to represent the ‘‘human spirit,’’ and so induce empathy inthe viewing audience that sits in judgment.

To compete and to win is to stop being a puppet, and so reclaim one’shumanity as a model of hope and true grit. Dramatic tension flows fromwhether the confessor, contestant, or social victim will be embraced, for-given, or humiliated. Will the studio or at-home audience laugh, applaud,cry, call in? The psychic equivalent of professional wrestling, why wouldanyone think such orchestrated group therapy should be public and brack-eted by commercials for feminine hygiene spray or hair products? The an-swer is that reality shows endorse particular life lessons that would befamiliar to Horatio Alger—if he was willing to forgo virtue and thrift for the

sake of narcissism and celebrity. Confession and humiliation sell becausetheir complement, forgiveness, is a lottery ticket included at no extra cost.Whether the reality character exhibits steely determination, pathetic desper-ation, or some breach between blind ambition and vulnerability that mediaexposure is supposed to heal, he or she serves the broader goal of defining




social and cultural life as a battle between competing sales pitches and

demographics. You’re America’s Idol. You’re fired. Be very afraid.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

While abortion is legal and socially acceptable in Japan, the Buddhistfocus on the afterlife of the soul leads some young women to locate Miz-uko Jizo figures in cemeteries to commemorate the death of the fetus.While there is an element in this of resisting bad luck by mollifying the

New York Times, 1/25/96, P. 1.

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individual fetus, clusters of identical figures standing along tiers of stone

amid more formal funeral monuments give them the force of reproachmore powerful for their identification with a collective history. What theMizuko Jizos might think or believe as they look back at the viewer is amirror of what the viewer believes them to think or believe.

In the collection of London’s Tate Modern, there is a video projectionby the artist Sam Taylor-Wood that in various ways takes on the problemof how sound shapes image, how image invokes sound, and how a view-er’s perception can be manipulated by identifying with both. In ‘‘Bronto-saurus’’ (1995), a nude man dances in an empty room to Samuel Barber’s

Adagio for Strings . The video loop, shot in slow motion, covers a largewall in an alcove, and the dancer’s spasmodic movement—evoking bothvisionary madness and hallucinogenic abandon—is riveting and disturb-ing. The image is projected well over life-size, and the man—thin, mus-cular, bearded, bathed in tones of brown and gold—appears like a Christfigure in a Renaissance painting as he moves with his eyes closed throughseries of ecstatic, disconnected gestures: a marionette controlled by invisi-ble strings. The slow-motion effects sometimes lend grace to the dance,but the twisting and thrusting of hands, arms, shoulders, and head is rare-

ly in sync with the music. That is because the dancer is in fact moving totechno dance music, not Adagio for Strings . Taylor-Wood is also pullingthe audience’s strings. By stripping away the performance soundtrack andreplacing it with one for the audience’s ears, she not only shifts therhythm of the dance, but opens up a wholly different set of associations.

Barber’s music establishes a particular emotional key—elegiac, striving,transcendent—that suggests that the dancer has entered an intensely in-ward state, embarked on a journey of the soul; the kind of immersion in the




spirit for which art is often given credit. While a version of this psychic

search may play a role in contemporary dance music, religious ecstasy isnot conventionally paired with the psychosexual forms of release associ-ated with the club experience. Here Taylor-Wood slyly suggests that wemight see the dance floor as a church and heightened narcissism as reli-gious expression. The audience hears the soundtrack and may wonder for atime why it does not seem to fit, reading on the dancer’s face flickeringsigns of pleasure, pain, and longing. But can’t awkwardness and discon-nection also be understood as signs of passionate commitment? The realityis that the dance is a calculated performance and—like other presentations

of art and language—self-conscious artifice, not a view into the interior lifeof the dancer. ‘‘Brontosaurus’’ skillfully rides a contradiction: the dancer judged in the light of rave culture can exemplify secular indulgence, whilethe artist displayed in the museum becomes a representative of high cul-ture, offering a moving video painting that expresses her own creative soul.

The dancer’s intentions seem transparent. The music plays, the camera re-cords, the dancer performs. Yet on stage, naked under the lights, aware of being taped and observed, he is ultimately alone. There is a narrative pro-posed, but no visible text to read or hear, no caption for the image. The dan-cer’s eyes are closed. He never looks back at the camera and this resistance,

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this interior pocket of silence, is all that he controls. The viewer standing in

the public space of the museum looks into the ‘‘private’’ space of the per-former and seeks a connection—some affinity between the opaque narrativeshe sees and the revelation she wants. The dancer’s absorption is suspect, al-most rejecting, but the enacting of the struggle against stasis (death) is real.This is also an intoxicating vision of freedom, where permission is granted bythe artist and her camera to pose and feel in public without shame.

Produced in Mexico since 1887 by the Pasatiempos Gallo Company, theLoteria consists of a deck of 54 numbered cards, each with a different illus-tration and caption. These images correspond to a group of 10 boards, or

tablas, which contain spaces for 16 card images. As with Bingo, when adesignated person selects and then announces numbers, here a dealerwould go through the deck and call out the cards by name or number. Var-ious combinations result in a winning board: a horizontal row, a verticalrow, a diagonal row, cards in a specified letter formation, and a full board.

Within Loteria the controlling mechanism is the tabla, background tothe meaningful life of the individual card. In some versions of the game,the distribution of cards is seen as prophetic, as with the casting of the I-Ching or a tarot deck: the sting of the scorpion, the confrontation with

mortality signaled by the human skull (La calavera), the ominous hand of the criminal (La mano), and the dead fish who opened his mouth oncetoo often do not point to good fortune now or in the future. On the otherhand, the aromatic and perennially beautiful pine tree could be a hedgeagainst the finality of death—a counter to the skull; and the talking par-rot—if judged inherently clever and not a tool of its owner—could repre-sent a spirit confident in its power and self-sufficiency.

With the sleight-of-hand tricks of the magic show, the rituals of the per-formance also create the conditions for audience response. The beginning




and the end of a trick—the before and after of whatever transformation is

involved—are prominently visible, in contrast to the secret momentswhen the mechanics of the magic are withheld from view. This gap inperception and logical continuity is what creates the tension and surprise,or at least the space where mystery might reside. How was that done?The magician relies on the ephemeral shift between visibility and invisi-bility and the willingness of an audience to question what they can andcannot see. How was I fooled? The transitional event which links thepuppeteer’s gestures and the puppet’s response, is a con of a different or-der because of how little of the mystery is withheld. The audience knows

that the puppeteer’s hand is moving the puppet’s head and pulling itsstrings. The puppeteer transfers his own energy and affect to the puppet,so that the puppet can appear to act for itself. While the content of theenergy may be different, in both the puppet theater and the magic show,the audience suspends their usual expectations of cause and effect, in or-der to vicariously participate in displays of finesse and prevarication.There is double pleasure in passively being taken in and, at the sametime, actively seeking to catch the performer in a lie. (Does the puppetlie about its power, if the audience is complicit in the fiction?) In this

sense, it is difficult to think of the magician’s tricks, and the maneuvers of the puppeteer, as somehow rendered invisible by the wish of the audi-ence to believe in the existence of mystical forces. Like shamans andstuntmen, the magician and the puppeteer can insulate the audience fromeverything but contact with the acting out of the illusion.

THE POWER TO MAKE USE OF ITS STRENGTH

Ancestor image, idol, fetish, talisman, amulet depend in their general conception upon the idea that the presentation of a god or a demon confers on the person who makes the image and who calls by name the thing represented the power to make use of its strength or to influence it. On these grounds the law of Moses for- bade, as idolatry, the making of images. With the image are associated ideas of amagic dwelling within it, a magic powerful enough to make use of the image .

—M. Von Boehn (1932, p. 56)

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Roman Paska (1992), in his essay ‘‘Notes on Puppet Primitives and the Fu-

ture of (an) Illusion,’’ looks behind the mystique of the inspirited pup-pet—ideal master or willing slave—whose traditional role, he believes, hasbeen to flatter the mimetic needs of the audience. A puppeteer who isaligned with the contemporary ‘‘theater of objects’’ movement, which ad-vances the creation of narratives inhabited by activated, common objects,Paska defines the life of the puppet primarily in terms of the puppeteer’scontrol. ‘‘The puppetness of an object is determined by use, not latency,and is a renewable, not a permanent quality’’ (p. 62). For example, if Iwere to take a pliers and move it through the air while clenching its jaws, it

would quickly become a creature—a threat or a parody of a threat—thatwould appear to have goals of its own apart from the motions of my hand.It would also temporarily leave behind its mundane functions—pulling outnails, turning pipes—that make it a credible performer.

In the ‘‘theater of objects,’’ the story made explicit through the actions of

the puppeteer enacts a relationship that is not imbued with magic , cap-tured or invoked. Significantly, this implies an acknowledgment, at least onthe part of the puppeteer, that the relationship has profound, but appropri-ate, limits. When the narrative ends, the puppet literally and metaphori-cally ‘‘dies,’’ returning to its original status as an inanimate object, whoserebirth is subject to the context and style of its use. This recognition of thepostmodern, contingent nature of the puppet’s identity, and the self-con-scious, privileged, stance of the puppeteer, is a pointed reminder for theaudience that the ‘‘inner process of simulation’’ is the main support for

their identification with the puppet’s life. What the puppeteer gives, thepuppeteer can take away, and so the audience glimpses an object lesson inthe domination of creative mind over workable matter.

The puppet can be the embodiment of both hope and despair. It is reli-ant on forces beyond its control for its ultimate survival. That is its des-




pair. But we, as puppeteers, or vicarious audience, can then become a

source of hope, the god to which the puppet can appeal. The puppet’spassivity becomes a noble submission as the puppeteer reenacts the life-giving event, transferring energy to the puppet, and then stepping back asif the puppet truly had a life of its own. Yet within performance, the pup-pet endorses the same blind optimism that we retain for ourselves: wheninactive, asleep or latently alive, it has the potential to wake up. This is just what we trust will happen when we close our eyes and go to sleep.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.If I die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

The puppet represents both fragility and resilience, so it is possible toempathize with it, even while recognizing that, removed from the lifesupport of the puppeteer, it crumbles into cloth, string, and wood or re-sumes its pragmatic life as a can opener, paper clip, or ballpoint pen.When tension and purpose leave the puppet form, its spirit seems to

withdraw into the material even as the controlling puppeteer carries theinert body out of sight. But these illusions also show that the puppeteercan be present and absent as well—both in and out of the existentialloop—at the same time merging with the background and becoming, incollaboration with the puppet, just another character acting out its tempo-rary life on the puppet stage.

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REVENGE OF THE HAND

Famed Czech animator Jiri Trnka’s final film The Hand (1965) is an alle-gory of an artist’s struggle to preserve vision and integrity under totalitarianrule. An everyman artist puppet desiring only to continue his work—thethrowing of clay pots for a treasured houseplant—is compelled by the Sta-te—in the form of a white-gloved human hand—to produce monuments of

the hand. After fighting to defend his vision and craft, the Artist Puppet diesand the Hand gives him an official funeral complete with a laurel wreathon his coffin. Produced during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia,the film advanced an unmistakable critique of arbitrary power utilizingstop action animation and tropes of children’s storytelling: simple puppetsand mundane objects, activated through broad gestures and effects. Ironi-cally, after Trnka’s death in 1969, he was given a state funeral, as several of

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his films had received government support. But 4 months later, The Hand

was banned and all copies confiscated by the secret police. It is difficult toappreciate the impact of the film’s message for its time.

How about a 2006 narrative of the artist as social hero: a reality showwhere a glamorous multicultural cast of artists share a loft and competefor a one-person gallery exhibition.

Reflecting on the genesis of the puppet’s life, The Hand can beseen to raise questions about what constitutes its power to persuadeand how this is augmented or undermined by the puppeteer’s hand.On one level, the puppet in The Hand embodies the audience’s sym-

pathy for—and the puppeteer’s patronage of—the innocent and theweak. A paper figure with open sad eyes, the Artist puppet seemsmaterially vulnerable—easy to crush, tear, or fold. In The Hand , thepuppet as artist also stands in for the artist as an intellectual andspiritual pioneer who in seeking the Truth is sometimes consigned topoverty, neglect, and martyrdom. When the artist puppet is terrorizedby the brutal Hand of the State he is available to represent the audi-ence’s sense of itself as no less desirous of the rewards of transcen-dence and freedom.

Yet any puppet can stand as a pawn in the game of culture, availableto flatter the audience’s good heart and intentions. Innocence and senti-mentality can entwine easily, whether in the puppet theater or in a con-temporary street side shrine of stuffed animals and balloons.

While The Hand relies on filmÕs ability to make transformations ap-pear seamless, Trnka still manages to destabilize the sense that objectsand characters have an independent will and means. The totalitariangloved hand moves and plots on its own, but because it is disembod-

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ied, it is hard to see it as anything but artifice brought in to represent

the theatricality of ideals both debased and enobling. The absurd—as indiscordant—joining of oversized hand and cartoonish puppet allowsboth characters to remain dependent on the audience’s projections of belief. If anything, the film makes abundantly clear that there are handsbehind the Hand—real controlling forces as Kafka might see it—mani-pulating the various masks and illusions of power.

In addition, the inclusion of a series of images of hands in the film(iron mail fist, boxing glove, Statue of Liberty holding the torch, handssupporting the scales of justice, the black leather gloved hand in a fas-

cist salute that ends the film) makes the case that the Hand—as anidea—has its own history and mythology that artists, historians, and cul-tural institutions have helped to propagate for varied ends. Despite theincorporation of electronic media and Duchampian conceptualism intothe museum and the gallery, the notion of the artist’s touch —embodiedin the unique, if not handmade thing—is still the standard by whichaesthetic objects are marketed and judged. The Hand, usually the mod-est servant of the Artist and the Puppet, has the opportunity in The Hand to take revenge on both: to make the point that it serves no one

and, in fact, is absolutely essential to the illusion and structure of thecreation. Why doesn’t it deserve a monument rendered in its ownimage?




THE PUPPET TAKES A STAND

By the language we use, we show our natural interest in this matter. I may be in a muddle, and then I either crawl out of the muddle or else try to put things in order so that I may, at least for a time, know where I am. Or I may feel I am at sea,and I take bearings so that I may come to port (any port in a storm), and then when I am on dry land I look for a house built on rock rather than on sand; and in my own home, which (as I am English) is my castle, I am in seventh heaven .

—D. W. Winnicott (1989, p. 104)

In the above quote, Winnicott locates a sense of conceptual fluidity andautonomy both in conventional language and in the experience of play.He identifies three areas of association: one involves the direct, practicalengagement with objects and institutions. The second is found in contem-plation, in the developing consciousness of self constructed and extendedto ensure participation in the world of things and events. While this per-ception of a stable inside and outside is integral to the process of individ-uation—the separating of the me from the not/me—Winnicott proposes a

third area, ‘‘the place where we live,’’ which is the transitional link be-tween inner and outer reality. This is the locus of play, creative action,

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where the ability to move between the rational and the irrational, the

seen and unseen, is practiced and learned.On a morning drive along a working-class commercial street near the

University of Southern California, I passed a man setting a sign on thesidewalk in front of his furniture store. It pictured a large, corny, hand-painted cartoon figure—a set of drawers with face, arms, and legs—notunlike any number of smiling examples demanding attention on bill-boards and store fronts. Yet when the sign appeared, I had the sense thata necessary piece of a puzzle had been put in place. What puzzle? Not afixed design with sustainable boundaries, rules, or a replicable point of

view, but more like a set for a story that was about to unfold for this mo-ment, in this time, place, and light. The sign brought other elements onthe street into a temporary realignment. What sense?

The order and purpose projected onto the random, everyday flow of street life in this neighborhood was my construction, yet it was significantthat the unifying element was a figure with eyes that looked out upon thescene and appeared to be waving in my direction. The sorting and filter-ing of language and image enabled by TV channel surfing and trolling theInternet places viewers in the position of the shopkeeper putting out his

sign. Paying attention, with or without a channel remote, allows viewersto intervene in the mix of image, sound, and sequence and so assembletheir own constellations of impulses and effects, ruptures, and associa-tions: their own purposeful or arbitrary, reading of events. As the successof Apple’s iPod suggests, even the usually unsettling idea of random-ness—’’Life is random’’—is acceptable if it has manageable boundaries,compelling packaging, and can be used to flatter the consumer’s desirefor autonomy.

STRING THEORY

I referred to two objects as being both joined and separated by the string. This is the paradox that I accept and do not attempt to resolve. The baby’s separating-out of the world of objects from the self is achieved only in the absence of a space between, the potential space being filled in the way that I am describing. It could be said that with human beings there can be no separation, only a threat of separation .

—D. W. Winnicott (1989, p. 108)

Another view of the sign as psychic placeholder is expressed by Winni-cott through his model of the string, a bridging metaphor that serves torepresent both connection and separation. In Playing and Reality , he




describes a 7-year-old boy who is brought into treatment after systemati-

cally tying up the furniture and objects in his house. Winnicott eventuallylearns that the child has developed a fear of abandonment after a seriesof events in which his mother was necessarily absent from home—includ-ing time spent in the hospital for depression and giving birth to a secondchild. Winnicott comes to the conclusion that the boy was denying thefear of separation through various symbolic attempts to enact connection.This mapping of the image to the perception or sensation that it repre-sents corresponds to the infant’s developing ability to absorb other quali-ties and levels of description through manipulation and play.

While children and adults both play with signs, Winnicott does notquestion whether graphic representations validate or distort experience

and he is not engaged in a critique of symbols except insofar as they re-flect some misdirection of their references through neurotic or psychoticbehavior. He sees a healthy and active engagement with signs as essen-tial. Signs are in fact made authentic by their participation in transitionalacts, whether these are futile gestures or acts of imagination from whichdreaming, object-relating, and cultural products are born. To paraphraseWinnicott: people can live with the threat of an unbridgeable gap be-tween lived experience and the sign, but the gap is ultimately unaccept-able.

Prayer, superstition, and mysticism all draw on the idea that good andbad luck, earthly rewards and eternal ones, are negotiable. But if, in theend, you can’t imagine a transcendent force making an investment in yourwell-being, trust yourself. Control your diet, perfect your body, purify your

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mind. Either way, all approaches lead to the same circumstance, or

dilemma: the power that controls destiny resides beyond tangible con-trol—whether somewhere out there, or somewhere in there if genetic codeis the source. When dolls and toys serve as surrogate heroes and victims instories and games, children get to play at the divine. But the adult worldmust entreat the unknown to look back and respond: fishing for compli-ments, love, or redemption; seeking enlightenment, God, or Mom—a signthat we are not alone.

Imagine a scenario that employs an invisible string, an action thatreduces the possibility that the object itself could be the focus of empathy, identification, or reward: you are part of an audience await-ing a lecture, and the scheduled speaker, without introduction orexplanation, takes out a pink rubber ball and lofts it into the crowd.Whether the impulse is to avoid the ball because you might drop it orto catch it because your ego requires it, someone near where the ballfalls will make an effort, and many others in the room will experiencethe same compulsion to answer the call—to complete the circuit.What goes up must come down. What goes around comes around.The motion of the throw that sends the charge, the appeal for helpthat the gesture implies, is what defines expectations. This is no lesstrue with the puppet’s animated form. The puppeteer’s movementssend the message of potential life through the puppet’s body, and theaudience claims it.

At base, the kinetic link among the puppeteer, the puppet, and the audi-ence is a collective invitation to, as Von Boehn says, ‘‘make use of eachother’s strength’’: an exchange embodied, not in some inherent spirit ormagic, or in a measurable moral design, but in the most profound—andeveryday—relational signs of speech, touch, gesture, and connection.




REFERENCES

Buber, M. (1965). Dialogue. In Between man and man . R. G. Smith, Trans. NewYork: Macmillan.

Bush, G. W. (2002). President’s remarks at national prayer breakfast. Available at:http://www.patriotsource.com/wtc/president/feb/020207a.html

Paska, R. (1992). Notes on puppet primitives and the future of (an) illusion. In The Theatrical Inanimate, a Conference on Changing Perception . New York: Jim

Henson Foundation.Piaget, J. (1972). The child’s conception of the world , Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams

& Co.Schumann, P. (1992). The radicality of the puppet theater. In The Theatrical Inani-

mate, a Conference on Changing Perception . New York: Jim Henson Foundation.Taylor-Wood, S. (1995). Brontosaurus . Video projection, variable dimensions.Trnka, J. (1999). The hand (animated film). The Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka. Chats-

worth, CA: Rembrandt Films.Von Boehn, M. (1932). Dolls and puppets . J. Nicoll, Trans. Boston: C. T. Branford.Winnicott, D. W. (1989). Playing and reality , New York: Routledge.

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presence. the touch of the puppet

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